Things I've Learned

Everyone knows that babies are a total time suck.  You have a new born, and life starts to fly by because you're living it in three hour increments.  You don't seem to have time to do anything important like eating and showering, let alone stuff you want to do, like reading or scrapbooking.  It kinda sucks.

Then, your newborn gets a little older, and you start to get into a routine.  You manage to shower and eat and pump your boobies while the little man is napping, because he's taking these great naps about 5 times a day still.  So what if they're only 45 minutes long?  45 minutes is all you need now, because you're a master multitasker at this point.

Still, you look forward to the day when your baby is older and can entertain himself.  You know that when he can sit up and starts to actually play with toys you're going to have even MORE time to get back to doing the things you'd like to do instead of just managing to squeeze in the stuff you need to do to exist.  Life will be GOOD, you tell yourself.

Then, your baby gets older and he can sit up pretty reliably and he can entertain himself with toys on the floor.  You're thinking, YAY!  I made it!  I survived the newborn phase!  Bring on the scrapbooking and the sewing and the reading books!

But - there's always a "but" isn't there? - there is one thing that no one told you about.  Something that you forgot to take into consideration.  That sweet baby that was taking five naps a day before?  Yeah, he's down to two now.  Even worse, one of those will still be the 45 minute special. 

So - when do you shower?  When do you eat?  When do you get to do the stuff you want to do, the stuff you've been looking forward to doing and missing for the past seven months?

The answer:  you don't.  Sucks to be you.  You have a pile of unread magazines that is literally three feet high.  You promised to do a book review on your blog IN JANUARY and the book is only half read.  You're lucky if you manage to shower every other day, and most of the time, it's every third day now.  You don't pump as often as you should due to the baby getting all sorts of pissed off that you're ignoring him and as a result, your milk supply, which was previously amazing, dwindles down to almost nothing, despite eating oatmeal, taking iron supplements, and downing fenugreek capsules.  You don't drink enough water because you just don't have a chance to fill up your bottle as often as before.  You go all day with your only meals being a brownie and a handful of corn chips.  

The worst part?  Any time you realize that you have to stop and take care of something important (feeding yourself, going to the bathroom, pumping, etc) you're going to have to do it with an angry child screaming his head off in the background.

I feel like just when I was getting the hang of this, I got smacked in the face with DIFFICULT - ROUND TWO.

I was looking at blogs a couple of weeks ago, and I came across this video.  You can't embed it anymore, but I found a crappy version that you could.  The song?  It's just okay, I think.  But here's what made it worthy of blogging about: when I clicked it to play, Bubba got very still, and you could tell that he was listening.  I thought it was funny but didn't think anything of it. 

Later, when my husband got home, I pulled it up again on YouTube and played it again to show my him the baby's reaction.  It was the same.  Then a few days later, during a screaming at mom session, I pulled it up again and he IMMEDIATELY STOPPED CRYING.  Whoa.  Don't you know I went to iTunes and downloaded that bad boy right away.

So now, when he's screaming at me, I can pull that up and play it and get about three minutes of peace (he usually starts screaming again at the "little bit of love" part in the middle) while he enjoys his song.  I don't know why it works, but I'm not going to question a good thing at this point!  Enjoy!